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This wide ranging and challenging book explores the relationship between subjectivity and mortality as it is understood by a number of twentieth-century French philosophers including Sartre, Lacan, Levinas and Derrida. Making intricate and sometimes unexpected connections, Christina Howells draws together the work of prominent thinkers from the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, religious thought, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, focussing in particular on the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. From Aristotle through to contemporary analytic philosophy and neuroscience the relationship between mind and body (psyche and soma, consciousness and brain) has been persistently recalcitrant to analysis, and emotion (or passion) is the locus where the explanatory gap is most keenly identified. This problematic forms the broad backdrop to the work's primary focus on contemporary French philosophy and its attempts to understand the intimate relationship between subjectivity and mortality, in the light not only of the 'death' of the classical subject but also of the very real frailty of the subject as it lives on, finite, desiring, embodied, open to alterity and always incomplete. Ultimately Howells identifies this vulnerability and finitude as the paradoxical strength of the mortal subject and as what permits its transcendence. Subtle, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in contemporary theories of subjectivity, as well as for readers intrigued by the perennial connections between love and death.

This book is an unusually readable and lucid account of the development of Derrida's work, from his early writings on phenomenology and structuralism to his most recent interventions in debates on psychoanalysis, ethics and politics. Christina Howells gives a clear explanation of many of the key terms of deconstruction - including differance, trace, supplement and logocentrism - and shows how they function in Derrida's writing. She explores his critique of the notion of self-presence through his engagement with Husserl, and his critique of humanist conceptions of the subject through an account of his ambivalent and evolving relationship to the philosophy of Sartre. The question of the relationship between philosophy and literature is examined through an analysis of the texts of the 1970s, and in particular Glas, where Derrida confronts Hegel's totalizing dialectics with the fragmentary and iconoclastic writings of Jean Genet. The author addresses directly the vexed questions of the extreme difficulty of Derrida's own writing and of the passionate hostility it arouses in philosophers as diverse as Searle and Habermas. She argues that deconstruction is a vital stimulus to vigilance in both the ethical and political spheres, contributing significantly to debate on issues such as democracy, the legacy of Marxism, responsibility, and the relationship between law and justice. Comprehensive, cogently argued and up to date, this book will be an invaluable text for students and scholars alike. Christina Howellsis Reader in French and Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

This reader is the first of its kind to present the work of leading French women philosophers to an English-speaking audience. Many of the articles appear for the first time in English and have been specially translated for the collection. Christina Howells draws on major areas of philosophical and theoretical debate including Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Law, Politics, History, Science and Rationality. Each section and article is clearly introduced and situated in its intellectual context. The book is necessarily feminist in inspiration but draws on an unusually wide range of thinkers, chosen to r

This is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date surveys of the philosophy of Sartre, by some of the foremost interpreters in the United States and Europe. The essays are both expository and original, and cover Sartre's writings on ontology, phenomenology, psychology, ethics, and aesthetics, as well as his work on history, commitment, and progress; a final section considers Sartre's relationship to structuralism and deconstruction. Providing a balanced view of Sartre's philosophy and situating it in relation to contemporary trends in Continental philosophy, the volume shows that many of the topics associated with Lacan, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida are to be found in the work of Sartre, in some cases as early as 1936. A special feature of the volume is the treatment of the recently published and hitherto little studied posthumous works.

This article considers Jean-Luc Nancy's reflections on the nude in painting and photography in the light of his aesthetics, his philosophy of the body and soul, and some of his other writings on portraiture. It explores Nancy's insistence on skin as the truth behind and beyond which no further meaning waits to be revealed: there are no hidden depths, no secret or sacred truths, nothing is concealed beneath the skin.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations and Guide to Referencing -- Introduction: Philosophy - The Repression of Technics -- I: Anthropology - The Invention of the Human -- 1. Adapt and Smile or Die! Stiegler Among the Darwinists -- 2. The Prehistory of Technology: On the Contribution of Leroi-Gourhan -- 3. Of a Mythical Philosophical Anthropology: The Transcendental and the Empirical in Technics and Time -- 4. Technics and Cerebrality -- II: Aesthetics - The Industrialisation of the Symbolic -- 5. Technics, or the Fading Away of Aesthetics: The Sensible and the Question of Kant -- 6. Experience of the Industrial Temporal Object -- 7. The Artist and the Amateur, from Misery to Invention -- III: Psychoanalysis - The (De)sublimation of Desire -- 8. 'Le Défaut d'origine': The Prosthetic Constitution of Love and Desire -- 9. The Technical Object of Psychoanalysis -- 10. Desublimation in Education for Democracy -- IV: Politics - The Consumption of Spirit -- 11. The New Critique of Political Economy -- 12. Stiegler and Foucault: The Politics of Care and Self-Writing -- 13. Technology and Politics: A Response to Bernard Stiegler -- 14. Memories of Inauthenticity: Stiegler and the Lost Spirit of Capitalism -- V: Pharmacology - The Poison that is also a Cure -- 15. Pharmacology and Critique after Deconstruction -- 16. Techno-pharmaco-genealogy -- Notes on Contributors -- Bibliography -- Index

Frontmatter -- contents -- introduction. From Capital Punishment to Abolitionism: Deconstructing the Death Penalty -- chapter 1. Beginning with Literature -- chapter 2. A New Primal Scene: Derrida and the Scene of Execution -- chapter 3. Always the Other Who Decides -- chapter 4. The Death Penalty and Its Exceptions -- chapter 5. Derrida at Montaigne -- chapter 6. "Bidding Up" on the Question of Sovereignty -- chapter 7. Calculus -- chapter 8. A Proper Death -- chapter 9. Figures of Interest -- chapter 10. Opening the Blinds on Botched Executions -- chapter 11. Furman and Finitude -- chapter 12. The Heart of the Other? -- chapter 13. An Abolitionism Worthy of the Name -- contributors -- index

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Inheriting Deconstruction, Surviving Derrida -- I Future of Deconstruction -- 1 Analytic Philosophy in Another Key: Derrida on Language, Truth and Logic -- 2 The Future of Critical Philosophy and World Politics -- 3 Derrida's Rogues: Islam and the Futures of Deconstruction -- 4 Force [of] Transformation -- II Interrupting the Same -- 5 Derrida's Memory, War and the Politics of Ethics -- 6 The (International) Politics of Friendship: Exemplar, Exemplarity, Exclusion -- 7 Ethical Assassination? Negotiating the (Ir)responsible Decision -- 8 Exploiting the Ambivalence of a Crisis: A Practitioner reads 'Diversity Training' through Homi Bhabha -- III Following/Breaking -- 9 Sartre and Derrida: The Promises of the Subject Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde -- 10 What It Is To Be Many: Subjecthood, Responsibility and Sacrifice in Derrida and Nancy -- 11 'Derrida's Theatre of Survival: Fragmentation, Death and Legacy' -- 12 Derrida vs Habermas Revisited -- Conclusions: The Im/Possibility of Closure -- Notes on the Contributors -- Index